Reflection Time!

Wow.. It really has come down to this! Who would have thought starting in July it would go this fast and that I would really be writing the last blog post of my journey.. and what a journey it has been!

Now in my final assessment I have been asked to reflect on the Registered Teachers Criteria (RTC).

I have chosen the following three criteria I believe I have met well and they are:

Criteria 4: Demonstrate commitment to ongoing professional learning and development of professional personal practice.

Throughout my six years of teaching I have been on a few Professional Development courses or alternatively had people come into school to take with a focus. However this has been my first experience back in a university setting since graduating from my Bachelor of Education in 2009. It has really given me a new lease on teaching and learning. I have always considered myself to be a lifelong learner however as teaching and real life set in it seemed like I was at times just going through the motions of teaching and not really pushing myself to find new information. I feel very appreciative of the teacher that encouraged me to partake in this course and have really learnt about the importance of continuing my professional learning and development not only for myself but for every student that comes into my class (or Innovative Learning Environment).

Criteria 5: Show leadership that contributes to effective teaching and learning.

This course has given me the opportunity to lead where previously I have never had the opportunity.
Through LDC I was really able to reflect on the kind of leadership theories I had and the potential leader that I could be. I really enjoyed and learnt a lot about what kind of leadership I related well to and how different people respond to different leadership strategies. This is one of the things I value the most that will stay with me throughout my teaching career. Also throughout the course I have been able to provide leadership to other colleagues and I am really grateful for this. My new knowledge has been used to help plan for our new ILE and I have truly learnt the value of what it means to be an inspirational leader.


Criteria 7: Promote a collaborative, inclusive, and supportive learning environment.
I really thought before I started this course that I knew what it meant to be collaborative.. But boy was I wrong! From the 21st Century Rubrics to discussions with lecturers collaboration was a lot more that just giving students a group task. It needed fostering and it really needed to go alongside a a supportive environment. I have learnt that you cannot just give students a task and expect that they will be able to 'do it'. They need guidance and support throughout the process and leadership when it doesn't work out so well. I have definitely been a lot more aware of how to be collaborative through this criteria and I finally know what it really means to be collaborative.

Goals for the Future:

I have thought carefully about the two goals that I would like to continue for the future and it is interesting/great timing that my students have just gone through the whole process of SMART goals too!

Goal 1: 
Continue Professional Development and to complete my post graduate diploma.
Plan (I work well on to do lists and bullet points)
-Set up meeting with Post Graduate Co-ordinator.
-Decide on field of study (what I want to continue developing).
- Discuss with Principal how this will help my future in education.
-Enrol in course
-Complete course.


Goal 2:
Continue to engage with my online communities.
Plan
-Find networks that are set up in my areas of interest.
- Talk to other school colleagues and find out good sites/people to follow etc.
-At the beginning of every CRT session engage with at least one of these communities.


I really struggle with intrinsic motivation (probably why I am writing this post a day before it is due!) So having a plan is really important to achieving both goals.
Thank you all so much for such a wonderful and eye opening experience! I am really looking forward to the future!!

Cultural Responsiveness

Through this weeks notes what really resonated with me was the comment that New Zealand was a bi cultural nation within which resides a multi cultural society. It feels like that is what really sums up this country to me but which some people tend to forget.

In my experiences throughout life I have been lucky to have had a range of experiences which have enhanced my indigenous knowledge. Due to family circumstances and connections I have always had Te Reo and Maori Tikanga in my life and feel very blessed to have had this upbringing. My teaching is responsive to the needs and protocol of my Maori students and I continue to learn and develop my practice through these interactions.

My school work hard to be culturally responsive to the bi cultural nature of New Zealand. Through the suggested bullet points I have chosen to merge 2 of the bullet points for how our school positively addresses cultural responsiveness.
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School-wide activities and communication methods:
I believe that our school is pretty amazing at this, which is due to some pretty amazing people in our school community. It all started with a core group of teachers and senior management getting together to discuss how to better engage with our Maori learners and their Whanau. The idea was that the school wanted to have Maori students being successful as Maori. The school then through this developed its Maori whanau group. This group meet regularly throughout the year to help plan school events and at the end of the year we hold a Maori Celebration night which identifies success for all our Maori students and is a special way to send off our Maori Year 6 students. This group also put together some wonderful Matariki celebrations which last year involved an awesome group of Dads being up at dawn to put in a hangi for our students to share - and with near 800 students is no mean feet. The celebrations also included a spectacular performance featuring our students and a visit from a local Kapa Haka group. I look forward to how this group will continue to shape our school and its commitment to the Treaty of Waitangi.

While our school-wide activities are such an asset to our school I think that we still need to be more culturally responsive in our learning experiences. It seems that due to teachers own doubts in their indigenous knowledge they are quite under confident creating learning experiences in the classroom for all students. We need to get better at sharing our knowledge with others and lifting the cultural responsiveness and confidence in others. It is not fair on the students that some have rich experiences with teachers who are creating lessons and plans while others are getting the bare minimum. However it is easy to point the finger at others it is our responsibility as a whole school to develop and support rather than to put down and/or ignore the problem.

Ethical Dilemma

As soon as I saw this weeks activity I immediately went straight to the Code of Ethics for Registered Teachers. It was then I started thinking about some of the 'ethical dilemmas' that I as a teacher have faced and never really thought about reflecting on how to approach the dilemma using the code. I will however now that I have been able to respond to a situation appropriately. I have chosen one situation I found myself in last year which I have chosen to use as part of this task.

Background to Situation:
I had a Year 5/6 classroom who all had internet access at home. Many of them were interested in social media accounts however being under 13 it is against the law for them to have access to an account.

Situation:
While completing independent work I noticed a note being passed around the classroom. I managed to intercept such note and proceeded to read what was being passed around. It turned out to be a Year 5 female students Instagram log on. After doing some research it turned out that the account was in fact the students own personal account (illegal as she was 9) and was completely public.

I was then faced with my ethical dilemma. What to do next with this information. After discussing privacy and social media forums legal expectations with the child it became clear that her mother was aware of the account and was even a 'follower'. It was a hard place to be in so we discussed what policies these pages had in regards to age and that not everyone in Instagram was there to be her friend. She then looked at her followers list and noted that out of the 100 followers she knew 10 of these people personally. We then discussed how to be safe online and she deleted who she did not know and made the account private. For me this came under my commitment to the learner. It was very tempting to just have her delete the entire account and be done with it however I had suspicions that this would just lead to her creating a new public account and starting again.

I also then logged the incident into our cyber safety log (as per school policy) and discussed with our schools cyber safety officer. She suggested speaking to the child's mother about what had been happening and reminding her of the legal fine print of these sites - Commitment to the parent/guardians. She also then spoke to the child again about the seriousness of the situation and the risks that she had put herself in.

I felt comfortable with how the situation had been resolved as I feel that school policies were followed correctly and I did not jeopordise myself in regards to the Code of Ethics. It is important that we are always honest with the people we interact with as teaching professionals and that we minimise harm to ourselves and in this case others.

Social Media

I will admit it. I am a social media addict. I have Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, and they all sit in an app organiser under "social media" and I probably check it at least five times a day. However before starting this course I really thought teaching/education and social media was a no-no. We are told in our time as Beginning Teachers - make sure everything is private, don't put photos of your students anywhere, no last names on blogs etc etc etc. It seems that from our perspective as schools social media is not our friend. Through this understanding when my nephew started a new school I was horrified that they had a Facebook page, but then I spoke to some people about it and their ideas were that if that was the way that a school could get parents interested in what was happening - why not? If parents were on Facebook and were reminded their child needed something tomorrow at school great! It then got me thinking well why not social media and how could it be used effectively by education establishments?

We have always been restricted in education by how much knowledge is around us. I remember when I was at school we could use the library to find information, an Encarta CD perhaps if you were lucky and your desktop computer could take CDs, and a field trip to somewhere which may or may not be all that helpful. Now the whole world is at our fingertips not only does a platform like google connect you to anywhere or anything you need to find you can use so much more to enhance the learning process. Video conferencing can connect you instantaneously to that expert on Hectors Dolphins in the South Island or a WW1 specialist in London. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter connect through to some amazing people that at the click of your enter button sees a whole world of information come back. A common saying is that life is all about connections, well now connections can be anywhere around the world and accessible at any time of the day! What and exciting time to be a learner/educator.

As previously mentioned it is important that we think about privacy. I have had two recent ethical conversations about the risks of social media and how people feel about their children having access to and being placed on these forums. The first was my friend (a dance teacher) who wanted to take a photo of her class at the end for her company's Facebook page. She checked with the parents that this was okay and one said that she didn't want her child on this page. My friend was a bit shocked by this but was respectful and did not post the photo. My thoughts were I suppose that that is fair enough, it is a parents call but I wonder if it was going on a dance website if this would be the same reaction? The other was on school camp we wanted to connect with our parents and put photos up online somehow that our students could use. Mine and a couple of others was why not Instagram? It is a perfect place for photos that was quick to use. However with questions on privacy we decided to go with a blog. I guess my question through both of these is what is the difference? Is there one between public websites/blogs and that of a social media forum such as Facebook and Instagram?

Another challenge is that of social responsibility and cyber safety. It is important to teach our students that not everyone online is honest and reliable. Talking to our students seems to be the best way to explain this and I think that at all times open and honest conversations about this need to be had frequently.

I have found some really useful places for professional development in all kinds of forums. Some of these are Facebook groups, Google Plus communities, the Virtual Learning Network, teacher blogs. For me their importance has been in the convenience and the fact that like with my students learning they have opened up a world of learning. I can be checking my Facebook page at night and a group has posted a video of some amazing lesson or resource they have used and I will try it the next day.

I believe social media can be a powerful learning tool however while it is still relatively new we are still in a teething period and only once through this will we really know the full extent of its capabilities.

Contemporary Issues in Education

I started this blog post/week thinking about what it meant to be a contemporary issue, and then like most people I know decided to head to google to see what they suggested. I typed into Google "Contemporary Issues facing education NZ" and not a lot came up to be honest, except for the 2012 ERO report. As I read through it again (after it being on our weekly task) I thought about how it was still quite current to our teaching practice even though this report was released 4 years ago. Then I started thinking if we were being made aware of these factors 4 years ago how then is it the same contemporary issue? Why have educators seemingly not made much progress through this issues? So seeings as I was now a little off topic worrying about why education has not made much of a charge in fixing these issues I have decided to pick two of these issues to reflect upon through this post.

Issue 1 - Student centred learning

Before I started on my Mindlab journey I was pretty oblivious to what it meant for student centred learning. I knew a little about what it meant but no one in my short(ish) career had never really been that passionate about it. Long Term plans looked a bit like this..
What are we going to do next year/term? What is something that is happening this year? Oh yeah that sounds good.. How do we fit it in to our curriculum coverage?
While that might be brief and a little straight to the point to save on word counts, I hope you get the point.. WHERE WAS THE STUDENT? It seems that there is no flexibility we are so worried about what we are doing and the context we are forgetting who in fact we are planning for. No mention of authentic tasks or what our students are interested in, and what confuses me more is that that I am sure while going through uni during our curriculum we were taught that this new curriculum was going to be an amazing thing for our schools and students. We were told about how flexible teaching could become, cross curricular links would be second nature, schools could adapt their practices to suit their learners. Yet five years after this (and even in 2016) ERO still see this as an issue.

The question is how would I address this? I think to start with we as educators need to start thinking of our students. What are the amazing things they are capable of doing? What do they enjoy? How do we encourage them to develop into life-long learners? Once we have an idea of our whole student and our goals for them, then we can start changing the way we plan and teach so that it isn't just ticking boxes or highlighting that achievement objective. It is only then that we can create the authentic tasks and real life problem solving that we have learnt about recently. I also believe that we need to start asking these questions when we sit down to look at the term/year ahead. Who are our learners? What are they interested in? How do we put them at the centre of their learning?

Issue 2 - Assessment to Inform Teacher Practice/Student Learning

I am sure I am not alone when I look at summative assessment timelines and shudder slightly. 31 Gloss/Ikan/Probes all due Week 2 Term 2. How am I going to get that done? Rush, rush, rush through each student enter onto (enter educational site here) and file away. Phew glad that was done now I have current data to enter into Term 2 reports. Now that may be a slight exaggeration but it's being honest. Teachers are notorious for complaining that assessments get in the way of teaching (and I would be one of them). However recently through conversations with colleagues I have been quite reflective on the fact that this is what I have been doing and how can I better test in order to actually know more about my students. Again without really thinking about this task I was quite responsive to how I could adapt testing in my classroom in order for myself and my students to get more out of it. I believe that we need to firstly have courage to trust our formative assessments and be prepared to back up why and how we have used it in our classrooms to inform our practice and also to encourage ourselves to think about when we summatively assess our students. If one student you think has made a huge amount of progress test them in Term 1 week 5. If you can't work out why another is not improving test Term 3 week 1. It is time to think wisely about assessment and really work out how we can use it for the betterment of our programmes rather than without purpose. It is then I feel that we will stop making such a fuss and complaining and will be better educators for it.